creaking, broken, wet
by Finnimbrun
Summary: Kisame can never go home again.


creaking broken wet

**Genre:** Character study?  
**Characters/Pairing:** Kisame (with a little bit of Itachi)  
**Notes:** This was written as a request. Prompt was: Kisame, his life and death.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Naruto or anything associated with it.

* * *

Kirigakure is made of gradations.

Clouds rise off the ocean in rolling gusts. They lift over the cracked rocks where the foam of the sea laps, licks up into the broken crags. Through the mornings, silent tidal pools swim with sightless crabs out of the dark places, and the dawn is a hard and impossible red behind the puffs of mist.

The mist comes in droplets too fine to see without a Sharingan, or better.

It is everywhere, and so is the red.

**~X~**

Kisame is born into one of the few lands which lays claim to the idea that _being born_ is more of a rarity than dying, and if you ask him, he'll tell you this explains a lot.

_They're mutants in Kirigakure no Sato_, some people say. Monsters.

Could be: from where the salt and the mist and the red have dripped up into their blood and through them. Dripped up and all inside, just between the teeth.

Could be that people drink up into their skin wherever they're from, drink home into their bones when they're born, so they're always going there, even when they can never go there again.

Kisame can never go home again.

Some people spend all their lives fighting back their homes, and some people let their homes live in them, and still others carry their homes around like a weapon.

They hold the handles of their homes with broad, callused fingers, keep them a safe distance away. Wield them.

But the only people who can do this are those who own themselves: their tragedies and histories.

If you ask Kisame, he'll also tell you too many people don't. Not in this world. People are always on the other sides of their homes, looking at where they've come from like it's the edge of a knife, about to cut them apart.

The worst are like Itachi, caught between both. They just slice themselves up, more every day.

Itachi will die in a bloody pile, and so will most of Akatsuki. They wash against the rocks and grate themselves over them.

Kisame knows he'll die, just like everybody else.

It won't be his own past that's swinging back and lopping his head off, though.

He can tell you that, too.

**~X~**

He is four, the first time he kills a person.

They were playing, and words were exchanged. Hot gusts of words, whole bags of needles, all up in their teeth. Kisame doesn't really remember. But he does remember when he reached over and took hold of a throat and pinched, crushed. And it made this sound, creaking broken wet, like the bones popping up, into, mixing with the blood and choking down. And it was over pretty quickly, then.

Four is big, in Kirigakure. It's bigger than it is elsewhere, and hard, because you've been thrashed against the rocks. The baby softness is scrubbed off.

That _creaking broken wet_ is louder, when you crush a throat, but it's another gradation. Kirigakure is full of _creaking broken wet_.

There are fish wives full of salt in their hair who stand in the pebbled streets and rake the skin off catches; crush crabs and pull the meat from their legs and bodies. Kisame helped his parents with this before he could talk.

He does the most in the forever red light of dawn, when the ships strike in, _creaking broken wet._

Peeling an orange is close enough to peeling a fish, which is close enough to peeling a human. Take them and cut away. Gut as necessary.

**~X~**

Itachi is quiet.

They're sitting in nowhere much of anything, and Itachi is watching the sky, which is dry and a red-orange that drips with gold and cloud spots. It will be pure dark soon. Kisame knows what Itachi is waiting for.

Shinobi hate the darkness, but they don't speak of it.

It's out there, and it's in the corners. A shinobi feels closest to death at dusk, when the light changes and falls away, because they can't forget that this is what they've come up out of, and what they're going into. Itachi's skin drinks up death. It's a fresh water death, a _Nakano_ death, not like the salt in Kisame's pores.

Itachi's death sinks in, pools under his eyelids. His eyes drift closed.

And the sun sets.

"We've had nothing to do for far too long," Kisame tells him.

And Itachi, who looks small in the shadows, nods, already dead.

And then one day, Kisame laughs a little, and looks over, and no one is there.

The light has gone on, and Itachi, too, is not here anymore.

The darkness outside presses through the corners and fills up the room like a smile.

**~X~**

Kirigakure is made of gradations.

The legends say its foundations were built in seven days. The humans came, carved up those rocks, crushed them and tore down the trees and stitched the pieces together. This is how villages are always made. And then blood supported it all like so much red plaster; kept it together and became money and paid off debts, and made wars, and more money and more debts. The people grew sharp teeth because there was something in the water some people said, or something in the air, or something in people that comes out with points.

So all the mist and the red gets caught in their gills and flows inside.

Some still look mostly normal enough.

Kisame kills in gradations, with a sword that shaves ribbons. He'll die in gradations, too. He dies the human way, every day, even though he thinks he's mostly not human, but he's still always been, somehow, more human than Itachi, and more human than most of Akatsuki.

Maybe that's backwards. Maybe they're more human for all that hurt, and he's something else for having taken his home in. It's not an issue he really thinks of. Maybe he's like a book or a boat, a tool, and sturdy; shinobi are tools. That's how it goes.

And it's not bad, being a tool.

Kisame remembers the vendors on the streets - with the bruised hands, wielding tools against lily fish bellies. The white opens and red spills out, and then a job is soon done. Tools do all the important things.

If Itachi was too smart to become a tool, he only became a better one. That's how life works. Well, it's how shinobi life works.

Kisame knows no other kind.

**~X~**

The red seems like home when he fights and kills and opens people.

The mist was red sometimes. The dawns were just impossibly bloody sun.

The air in most other places he's been since has been different: drier, but less sharp and full of needles up in your teeth. Stale dead air, sweet and grassy. That's air for people like Itachi, maybe. Kisame likes the air that prickles his lungs and gets caught in his gills.

Someday, he hopes, he won't diffuse into the sunset, but will go down in the red he was born in, in the sharp air, with the needles in the teeth, and the sound of all his childhood -

_creaking broken wet._


End file.
